


On the Transmutation of Soul

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Fix-it: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Episode Tag: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 16:08:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14452857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: Missy is given a second chance, now, when she's really earned it.





	On the Transmutation of Soul

This forest isn’t real, but this forest listens. 

As the trees comb mist from the skies, brushing tender needles against a stenciled ceiling, so the moss gathers thought from the murmurs of the fallen; so the earth conveys life from their fingertips, stores it in seed and stone, sends it along root systems and subterranean streams. Place your ear against the ground, feel the tremor. Press your palm to the loam, what you hear is fervent, fierce. 

_Too late_ , says one voice. 

_Not yet!_ pleads the other. 

The fog pauses. Considers. It descends and expands to permeate the forest. It was going to anyway, it’s here for other reasons, but...infinity is vast, and there’s time--

So: the wood was coppiced, once. The light is crepuscular, if artificial. Sprawled atop the leaf litter like a wrecked and twisted bird, the Time Lady with the sad eyes and the mad laugh lies suspended in the moment of death. 

_I thought…_

She’d been so clever, hadn't she? The seduction, the flattery, the knife with its fastidious, tender precision mid-embrace. Before that, the long, patient waiting, her ambivalence a sacred thing, her way of keeping secrets, even from herself. At the last moment she’d forgotten not to turn her back. 

This is how the story goes. Complacent, the Master loses, meticulous plans crumbling, cathedrals destroyed as stone is by water and moss and time. She didn't know, before, that defeat was possible even when you were trying not to play the game. As lessons go, such a loss seems rather cruel. 

She is, technically, dead. But that’s never stopped this particular entity before, and her atoms--the community of her atoms, though the individuals come and go and the molecular arrangements shift every so often--remember. In fact, they are so convinced she is still alive and that the cellular machinery, with its bucket brigades of energy will start up again at any second that to bring her back would be trivial. One accident of thought, and there she’d be! Up and gasping.

The water that listens in the trees, the skyfarer who watches the wood, the girl with the star in her eye believes in possibilities. When the universe is suddenly as vast as it has become for her of late, it would be petty not to. And she seems to remember that this one was crying, too, not so long ago. 

The Pilot makes herself manifest. It's easier to recreate a person when she's a person herself. (It would be a mistake to carelessly restore a Time Lord as a serpent, or a glacier, or a sun.) She brushes ineffable fingers over the still cheek, still warm. There's a thing that Time Lords do, normally, but this time it's gone awry...

_We shoot ourselves in the back!_

And anyway, Missy hasn't really finished with this form, just yet. 

Somewhere nearby, explosions shake the solar farm. Plumes of smoke cloud the firmament. The whole deck’s been rigged to blow, the Doctor’s last stand meant to take out as many cybermen as possible and give his friends a fighting chance, a few levels above. Heather will be required there, very soon, but here’s another friend of his who finally deserves a chance. 

The Doctor will need this friend. We always do. 

_It's all I've ever wanted._

If not strictly-speaking true, it is the truth, the first thing either of them wanted, a wish and also a promise taken for granted like the pale pink light slanting onto their copybooks in the classroom every morning. 

Oh! Let them find each other again; they were only infants then, and they're a little older now.

“It's time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Heather says, gently slapping the pale jaw. “You have things to do.”

The body breathes life back into itself, a video playing, briefly, backwards. The universe tucks its loose strand back in, threading the weave of a slightly altered pattern into the eternal, stable warp. It's a sentence altered, erased and begun again, transmuted. It's an acquittal and a retelling. 

Sight returns to Missy. She’s just in time to see the trees catch fire and sense the approaching concussion before she is transported to the familiar, pulsing belly of a Type 40 TARDIS, lights blown and bell striking in mad fear. 

There was a girl, Missy seems to think, and a flood of water, like a spring. 

She hauls herself to her hands and knees. She reaches for a curving wall, a trail of thought or heat, something to find her way by. Her hair is loose against her neck. She remembers coming to in another TARDIS, not so long ago, blood still drying in her hand and on her coat, hair around her shoulders. She'd been running then, from a ship caught on the lip of a black hole and a future she hadn't wanted to repeat, and some furious certainty that had slipped as soon as she'd tried to grasp it. 

She had forgotten; forgotten so much. Now she knows. Now, she understands. She's been given time, it isn't too late at all, and that future of so many lifetimes ago--it was never going to be easy but now at least it's possible. If there had been everything to lose, then there is now everything to gain. 

Here's a secret she can tell herself at last: she's terrified. 

She picks herself up. She has things to do. She reaches into the ether for some trace of her oldest friend, for the trouble and the glory that was always meant to be theirs, together, by which she'll find her way, a path of stars they'll beat through the heavens...

“Doctor…”


End file.
